Author Iris Murdoch Dies

Dame Iris Murdoch, one of Britain's most admired modern novelists, died Monday at the age of 79.

The cause of death was not announced, but Murdoch was diagnosed in 1996 as suffering from Alzheimer's disease, a condition she described in its early stage as "a very, very bad, quiet place."

She died at Vale House in Oxford, said Patricia O'Leary, administrator at the home for Alzheimer's patients. Murdoch's husband John Bayley, who had cared for his wife through her last years, was with her at the time of her death.

Bayley, the academic, critic and writer who was Murdoch's partner for more than 40 years, wrote of her life and the progression of her disease in Elegy for Iris, published in 1998.

"The voyage is over," Bayley wrote, "and under the dark escort of Alzheimer's she has arrived somewhere. So have I."

Philosophical speculation, religion, magic and metaphysics run through many of Murdoch's 26 novels. One of her most famous A Severed Head, published in 1961, was a farce about infidelity, incest and violence.

Novelist Malcolm Bradbury remembered her as being "amongst the four or five great novelists of the second half of this century to come out of Britain."

Born into an Anglo-Irish family in Dublin on July 15, 1919, Jean Iris Murdoch was educated in England at Badminton School, Somerville College, Oxford University, and at Newnham College, Cambridge University.

Before beginning to teach at Oxford, Murdoch spent a year at Cambridge studying with disciples of the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein.

In 1956, she married Bayley, and for many years the couple kept a famously chaotic household in the village of Steeple Ashton, 100 miles west of London. They later moved to a vine-covered house in north Oxford.

Murdoch's first published novel was Under the Net in 1954, and it won immediate praise.

"I invent the whole thing before I start writing," she once explained, "even the conversations are in my head. I don't start writing the thing until I've got the whole of it absolutely."

One of her most admired novels was 1973's The Black Prince about a middle-aged would-be writer and his professional rival's young daughter. It won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize.

Her 1978 work, The Sea, The Sea about a retired film director trying to win back his first love, won the Booker Prize, widely considered Britain's highest literary honor.

In 1987, she was made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire, the equivalent of a knighthood for women.

Her last novel, Jackson's Dilemma, was published in 1995.

Murdoch and Bayley had no children. Funeral arrangements were not immediately announced.